As businesses and enterprises migrate to the Cloud for accessing IT resources, they require reliable, contextual data for choosing a service provider that will best suit their particular constellation of needs. Evaluating cloud providers may be difficult because the service measurement indices (SMIs) used to evaluate performance may vary widely from one service provider to the next. One method of comparing cloud service providers is to gather individual reports through word of mouth, blogs, and social networking. However, individual reports are highly unstructured, lack context, and do not address all of SMIs.
Another method of choosing a cloud service provider may be to process and integrate social sentiment data from a variety of social networking sources such as Twitter®. However, sentiment analysis may have substantial inaccuracies, especially if generic and not tailored to a specific domain like cloud computing. Additionally, generic opinion mining may lack a structured detail on specific service categories. Alternately, benchmarking services may be able to periodically measure the fine details of the many technical components of a cloud platform, reporting the performance to a consumer. Unfortunately, benchmarking is expensive, and the results lack an aggregate user's perspective for “how all the pieces fit together” to make a good cloud computing experience.